Couple Didn't Open Wedding Gift From Aunt For 9 Years

By: Clayton Browne | June 14, 2019

Kathy and Bill Gunn waited nine long years to open a wedding gift. The gift was a white box from Kathy’s great Aunt Alison with an envelope that read, “Do not open until your first disagreement.”

“Now, there had obviously been plenty of disagreements, arguments and slammed doors throughout our 9 years,” Kathy wrote in a Facebook post about opening the wedding gift. “There were even a couple of instances where we both considered giving up...but we never opened the gift.”

Then, this summer, the Gunns were thinking about what kind of wedding present to buy for an upcoming wedding in Kalamazoo, and when she was thinking about the best gifts she and Brandon had received, the gift that came to her mind was Aunt Alison’s unopened gift.

Kathy noted that she and Bill had been “too stubborn and determined” to open the box all these years and had felt for so long that opening it would be some kind of relationship “failure”.

“It forced us to reassess situations,” she explained in her post. “Was it really time to open the box? What if this isn’t our worst fight? What if there’s a worse one ahead of us and we don’t have our box?!? As my Great Uncle Bill would say, ‘Nothing is ever so bad that it couldn’t get worse.’”

The couple decided to go ahead and open the box that night, and they found two hand-written notes wrapped around some cash, wine glasses, a vase and bath products. The note to Kathy told her to use the money to buy a pizza and to get a bath ready. The note to Brandon instructed him to use the cash to buy flowers and a bottle of wine.

Kathy explained what her Aunt Alison’s gift meant to them: “For 9 years (and three moves) that box sat high on a shelf in various closets gathering dust, yet it somehow taught us about tolerance, understanding, compromise and patience.”

She went on: “Our marriage strengthened as we became best friends, partners, and teammates. Today, we decided to open that box, because I finally had a realization. I realized that the tools for creating and maintaining a strong, healthy marriage were never within that box – they were within us.”